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The man behind the austere, industrial Northern landscapes is often characterised as sparely as the “matchstick men” that made him famous.

But LS Lowry, who has only just been honoured with a retrospective at Tate Britain nearly 40 years after his death, was a great deal more fun and sociable than the remote recluse that he was frequently painted as by others.guaranteed rental property

Rare pictures of the artist, who was great friends with the Marshall family who owned the Stone Gallery in Newcastle upon Tyne, show him larking about on the steps of the gallery, celebrating his 84th birthday and sitting in the office after one of many social occasions.

Click here or on “View Images” for more pictures

The artist would visit the Marshalls on his frequent visits to the Seaburn Hotel in Sunderland. Tilly Marshall later chronicled their friendship in Life With Lowry, and her son Simon used to ferry him around the coast where he would collect material (but rarely draw) for his pictures.

Simon Marshall describes Lowry as an elderly relation who became gradually absorbed in their lives having just wandered into the gallery off the street one day.

“Over the years I must have driven him thousands and thousands of miles; to Holy Island, Gretna Green and Portpatrick, where he believed his ancestors came from. I very rarely saw him sketch or work outside,” Simon Marshall wrote recently.guaranteed rental property

“Although he carried a wallet with bits of paper in and might draw something on an envelope as we walked around, he mostly liked to work at home. He was absorbing things as we went, and would then appear at some later stage with a drawing of a place we’d been to, done from memory.”

Simon Marshall is frank about Lowry’s penchant for games which sometimes bordered on the maddening. “He loved repeating himself, and he’d push it to see how far he could go. We’d be driving along in the car and he’d say to me: ‘What happens if the wheel falls off?’ ‘We’ll go in the ditch, Mr Lowry.’ ‘Hmm.’ Ten minutes later: ‘What happens if the wheel falls off?’ and so on,” he said.

“He could be great fun, but he could be awful. He could be exceedingly amusing, but also an absolute little sod. He had some moods where he was not at all nice, but most of the time he was really very pleasant and jolly. He used to say to waitresses in restaurants: ‘Could I have this water diluted?’”

Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life, Tate Britain until 20 October 2013

guaranteed rent for landlords | The Internship: inside Silicon Valley, land of the geeks

We seek properties all over England for our guaranteed rent scheme. All properties must be clean, in a good state of repair, fit for human habitation and safe. If they are not we may be able to help you anyway so it is worth giving us a call.

‘The Internship’, out this week, is a film set in a fictional Silicon Valley. But what’s the real one like? Christopher Beanland went to find out.

“People think that mound is where Leland Stanford is buried,” the student tour guide said, sweeping a slender arm over to the left and drawing my eye to a wide expanse of manicured green grass. “It’s actually the wireless row-ter.” She grinned with the mischievousness of youth. “The Wi-Fi coverage is so good that I love to study outside.”
The Stanfords made their money in the railways that swept west in the 1800s, railways for which American Indian lands were cleared so that investors could make millions. Like so many other rich families, the Stanfords feared the wrath of God in the afterlife and wanted to make amends.
They bequeathed a university and had the grounds designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, who laid out Central Park. “The Farm” – or Stanford University, at Palo Alto, 30 miles south of San Francisco – is the resulting enormous campus, and its lush fields stretch as far as the eye can see in every direction. At its pious centre is a church like something airlifted from a Mexican pueblo. The stained-glass windows refract the sunlight; mystery hangs in the air.guaranteed rent for landlords
Leland Stanford embraced “his” west and wanted California to become self-sufficient, not reliant on the established east coast. Frederick Terman, a professor at the university in the Thirties, was of the same mind. He encouraged two of his students, David Packard and William Hewlett, to stay on in Palo Alto, not to move east.
Just 10 minutes’ drive from The Farm, I found myself in the picture-book suburbs of the American dream. At 367 Addison Avenue sits a bucolic Arts and Crafts-style house made of wood and painted green and gold. The garage in the driveway is where Hewlett and Packard decided to form their own company in 1939 and build the HP200A – an audio oscillator. Walt Disney bought eight and put them to work making the movie Fantasia.

Silicon Valley fuelled the film-makers’ craft, but it’s only recently that it has fired film-makers’ imaginations. First there was The Social Network, a slow-burning examination of the Facebook phenomenon. This week sees the British release of The Internship (out July 4), in which two losers played by Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson lark around at Google. The intern programme in the film is designed for university high-fliers, but the two fortysomethings blag their way on, with excruciating results. Later this year we should see a biopic of Apple’s founder Steve Jobs, starring Ashton Kutcher in the eponymous role.
All these films give a glamorous sheen to Silicon Valley. The reality is more run of the mill. The HP garage has been christened “the Birthplace of Silicon Valley”, and outside a handsome plaque testifies to the importance of the site.
It was the middle of the day but the place was deserted. Silicon Valley is still, for now, a mystical place that few bother to get the measure of. A hundred years from now, though, a pilgrimage there might be as essential as one is now to Rome, Athens or Istanbul. This is where a new society, a new way of living, is being created.
I met Jesse Warr, a fixer and tour guide, who drove me past the property where Jobs used to live. His widow, Laurene Powell, and three children, still live in the Dordogne-style house. Pointedly, there are no electric gates or high walls. Palo Alto is a perfect dormitory town with perfect houses and perfect-looking people.
We passed the office block in its centre where Facebook once rented space and stopped at Pizza My Heart, a Hawaiian-themed joint where Stanford students and app designers intent on making a million eat lunch and talk about rock music or surfing.
I ordered a slice of Big Sur, which comes topped with garlic, sausage and pepperoni, and asked Warr what his favourite food was while I poured Parmesan and chilli flakes on to my slice. “Salad,” he replied, taking a bite of his veggie pizza. Like Leland Stanford, Mark Zuckerberg (one of the founders of Facebook) and so many more, Warr came to California from the east in search of a new life.

Zuckerberg once rented a house nearby, as did Larry Page and Sergey Brin – two Stanford students who didn’t just want to make a search engine, they wanted to make something with artificial intelligence. Their company seems set on world domination from its base up the road. The nondescript houses of the suburbs, with fanciful names such as Sunnyvale and Mountain View, are still the incubators of the next big thing in the digital world.guaranteed rent for landlords
Needing more space, Facebook recently relocated to a sprawling office complex that Sun Microsystems used to call home. It’s on reclaimed flatlands surrounded by marsh. I couldn’t stop staring at the birds, the kind of birds John James Audubon painted and documented in Birds of America.

The road running around the perimeter of what looks like the office of an insurance firm in Milton Keynes gives only a tiny clue to what’s inside: its name is Hacker Way. On the corner of Hacker Way and the Bayfront Expressway is a sign that usually displays a giant “thumbs up” – the “Like” logo from Facebook – but that day workers were putting up a new poster.
We passed the offices of Oracle, eBay, Microsoft and McAfee – all strung along Highway 101. Just beyond the road Warr pointed to the HQ of Yahoo – this once-dominant internet player was started by Jerry Yang and David Filo, who studied together at Stanford.
Silicon Valley used to be called the Valley of Heart’s Delight because of the blossom on the fruit trees. In downtown San Jose neat squares and boxy office blocks squat where orchards used to bloom. Adobe’s HQ towers over the city centre. The Tech Museum of Innovation has a series of child-friendly exhibits exploring the world of science, with Segways and astronauts featuring largely.
No one mentions the wars. Defence has made California rich: Hewlett Packard sold its systems to armies and the internet was developed initially as a military machine. It is a great paradox of the online world that, while it has led to a new era of dissent, it also concentrates power in the hands of a few corporations and allows the spooks to do their jobs from a desk with a soda in one hand and a mouse in the other. The enormous hangars at Moffett Federal Airfield, where airships used to be stored, are graphic reminders of the area’s military presence, past and present.
We diverted back through Palo Alto. Posters lined the road – Oliver Stone was due to give a talk that night at Stanford about his new television show, Untold History of the United States, in which he talks at length about how modern America has been shaped by commercial interests.

The fetishisation of technology brands reaches its apotheosis at Apple’s HQ in Cupertino. In the company store there, I deliberated whether to buy a T-shirt saying “Cupertino – Home of The Mothership” or a Babygro with an Apple logo on it. Apple aficionados were bulk-buying souvenirs all around me.
The shop at the nearby Computer History Museum is better – a paean to progress, to nerds and to geeks. You can buy books with titles such as Punched-Card Systems and the Early Information Explosion, biographies of Alan Turing, and posters of Google’s first server and the 1984 Apple Macintosh.
The museum’s zoomed-in photos of diodes and circuits and chips fascinated me and I couldn’t stop looking at the man-made patterns. As my eyes went dizzy I imagined the future. A future when all of us would be inextricably linked to a world where computers were legion and key to everything. A future that was imagined and created here in northern California. People will come here in the future. People will come in droves – to worship, to protest and to see where it all started.

guaranteed rental scheme | Analysis – ECB drops old philosophy but is short of new options

Most of our landlords use our guaranteed rental income scheme. We have our own list of tenants waiting to move into properties. But just in case there is a void period, should happen, and for some reason your property should be without a tenant, we offer a rent guarantee scheme .

(Reuters) – The European Central Bank’s vow last week to keep record-low interest rates “at present or lower levels for an extended period” is a big philosophical shift for a bank that used to insist it would not tie its hands.

On the face of it an unprecedented and bold move, such ‘forward guidance’ is really just formal recognition of what markets expected anyway, and the bank’s realistic policy options are narrowly confined.guaranteed rental scheme

ECB President Mario Draghi, who vowed a year ago to do “whatever it takes” to save the euro, said the move was driven by market volatility, which set in after the U.S. Federal Reserve last month set out a plan to begin slowing its stimulus.

“Draghi’s message was a clear break from the ‘we never pre-commit’ ECB of the past,” said Andrew Bosomworth, a senior portfolio manager at Pimco, the world’s largest bond fund.

“The Governing Council wants the world to know they are on a different timetable to the Fed,” he added.

But the ECB’s steer is more flimsy than the guidance offered by the Federal Reserve or even the Bank of England, which suggested last Thursday it could give more detailed guidance on monetary policy as soon as next month.

The risk is that when the Fed does begin unwinding its stimulus, the ECB’s words won’t be enough to protect the euro zone from the fallout, and market interest rates will rise – a scenario that would make the bloc’s escape from crisis harder.

Then the ECB would have to back up its words with action, and the policy options it has are unpalatable to many at the bank – a conservative institution focused on inflation fighting.

“What they have done is very soft. We don’t know what ‘extended period’ is,” said Anders Svendsen, analyst at Nordea.

RBS economist Richard Barwell agreed: “Nobody thought they were going to hike rates … It was a statement of the obvious.”

A Reuters poll of more than 60 analysts conducted before last Thursday’s policy meeting showed they already expected the ECB to keep its main refinancing and deposit rates on hold at their record lows until at least the end of next year.

The ECB duly held its main rate at 0.5 percent and left the deposit rate it pays banks for holding their money at zero.

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The phrasing of the ECB’s guidance is crucial. Draghi said the Governing Council “expects” rates to remain at their existing level or go lower, he did not make a cast-iron promise.

The morning after the policy announcement, Governing Council member Erkki Liikanen qualified the pledge to keep rates low, saying it is good for as long as the economy remains weak.

“When there are changes, they will be taken into account. Everything depends on the development of the economy,” he told Finnish broadcaster YLE.

A sudden, if unlikely, pick-up in the euro zone economy or an oil price shock could easily force a change in policy.

The more immediate threat to the euro zone, however, is fresh market turmoil when the Fed begins unwinding its stimulus.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s announcement on June 19 that the U.S. economy central bank was likely to begin slowing the pace of its bond-buying later this year sent peripheral euro zone sovereign bond yields sharply higher.

A political crisis in Portugal pushed yields on its benchmark bonds above 8 percent last week, near levels that forced it to seek international aid two years ago.

RBS’s Barwell said the ECB’s guidance should inoculate shorter-dated bond yields from the impact of the Fed ‘tapering’.

“What happens if that fails? What happens if the contagion comes nonetheless? Then they are back in the ball game of they might have to do something rather than talking,” he said.guaranteed rental scheme

Yet the conditions attached to the ECB’s sharpest policy tool – its bond-buying programme known as Outright Monetary Transactions (OMT) – mean the central bank cannot use it to help Portugal at the moment, or even Spain or Italy for that matter.

OMT requires a country to seek outside help from the euro rescue fund – which neither Rome or Madrid have done – and be issuing debt regularly on the bond market for the central bank to intervene and buy its bonds.

Portugal has been issuing Treasury bills but is not regularly issuing longer-dated bonds across the yield curve. Draghi said last week the ECB rules on the OMT were unchanged, all but directly leaving Portugal alone to resolve its crisis.

That leaves more specific guidance – with a clearer timeframe – or straightforward rate cuts as alternative options. Draghi said the ECB discussed cutting rates last week.

The trouble with rate cuts is that the ECB’s low rates are not reaching all euro zone economies evenly, with lenders in crisis-hit states passing on higher funding costs to customers.

A further option is to offer banks another batch of ultra-cheap long-term loans, known as LTROs. The ECB lent banks a total of more than 1 trillion euros in such twin three-year lending operations in December 2011 and February 2012 – a ploy that Draghi said “avoided a major, major credit crunch”.

The interest rate on the loans, which banks are now repaying early, is tied to the ECB’s refinancing rate. Barwell believed a new LTRO would need to be offered at a fixed rate for banks to take it up, and thereby push down market interest rates.

“I think it can’t be the same as what’s been done before,” he said. “My view is that they’ve got to make it more attractive, and the key thing to do would be a fixed-rate LTRO.”

The International Monetary Fund is already pressing the ECB to take such action. In its annual Clause IV consultations with Italy, the IMF on Thursday called for the ECB to complement Italy’s reform efforts with direct assets purchases and more bumper loans to euro zone banks.

“Direct asset purchases by the ECB, such as for SME credits, another LTRO of considerable tenor, and lower haircuts on eligible collateral would help lower bank funding costs and lending rates,” the IMF said.

Full-on asset purchases with a U.S.-style quantitative easing programme could depress yields further out than the 2-3 year maturities that Pimco’s Bosomworth said the ECB’s commitment to low rates for an “extended period” would cover.

But the conservative DNA of many ECB policymakers makes them averse to such radical policy steps.

Going further would be much harder for the ECB. Draghi stressed last week that the move to take forward guidance was “unprecedented” and a “very significant step”.

“This was as strong a commitment as one can get that the ECB will remain accommodative for as long as needed,” said Bosomworth.